“Who’s there?” he asked, but without alarm, supposing it one of his fellows.

“It is I,” softly answered Peter Blood in the fluent Castillan of which he was master.

“Is it you, Pedro?” The Spaniard came a step nearer.

“Peter is my name; but I doubt I’ll not be the Peter you’re expecting.”

“How?” quoth the sentry, checking.

“This way,” said Mr. Blood.

The wooden taffrail was a low one, and the Spaniard was taken completely by surprise.  Save for the splash he made as he struck the water, narrowly missing one of the crowded boats that waited under the counter, not a sound announced his misadventure.  Armed as he was with corselet, cuissarts, and headpiece, he sank to trouble them no more.

“Whist!” hissed Mr. Blood to his waiting rebels-convict.  “Come on, now, and without noise.”

Within five minutes they had swarmed aboard, the entire twenty of them overflowing from that narrow gallery and crouching on the quarter-deck itself.  Lights showed ahead.  Under the great lantern in the prow they saw the black figure of the other sentry, pacing on the forecastle.  From below sounds reached them of the orgy on the gun-deck:  a rich male voice was singing an obscene ballad to which the others chanted in chorus: 

“Y estos son los usos de Castilla y de Leon!”

“From what I’ve seen to-day I can well believe it,” said Mr. Blood, and whispered:  “Forward — after me.”

Crouching low, they glided, noiseless as shadows, to the quarter-deck rail, and thence slipped without sound down into the waist.  Two thirds of them were armed with muskets, some of which they had found in the overseer’s house, and others supplied from the secret hoard that Mr. Blood had so laboriously assembled against the day of escape.  The remainder were equipped with knives and cutlasses.

In the vessel’s waist they hung awhile, until Mr. Blood had satisfied himself that no other sentinel showed above decks but that inconvenient fellow in the prow.  Their first attention must be for him.  Mr. Blood, himself, crept forward with two companions, leaving the others in the charge of that Nathaniel Hagthorpe whose sometime commission in the King’s Navy gave him the best title to this office.

Mr. Blood’s absence was brief.  When he rejoined his comrades there was no watch above the Spaniards’ decks.

Meanwhile the revellers below continued to make merry at their ease in the conviction of complete security.  The garrison of Barbados was overpowered and disarmed, and their companions were ashore in complete possession of the town, glutting themselves hideously upon the fruits of victory.  What, then, was there to fear?  Even when their quarters were invaded and they found themselves surrounded by a score of wild, hairy, half-naked men, who — save that they appeared once to have been white — looked like a horde of savages, the Spaniards could not believe their eyes.